


Other Gardens

by alicekittridge



Series: Moments In Time [3]
Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Angst, Another tiny one but it counts, Character Death, Character Study, F/F, POV Third Person, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:02:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27159730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alicekittridge/pseuds/alicekittridge
Summary: This is an epilogue, of a sort...
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Series: Moments In Time [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1982450
Comments: 3
Kudos: 47





	Other Gardens

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was actually the first work I wrote for this show, but didn't post until now because I was dissatisfied with it. I apologize for the spam of writing, lately, but I didn't know where else to put this. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading xx

**I.**

**Fallow**

**T** **his is an** epilogue, of a sort, to tell what happened to our little gardener in her newly lonely life. The story is a shorter one, to be sure, but no less bittersweet than the last.

It opens in the days after that final clause in the lake. Drunk with the grief she’d believed she was prepared for, the gardener stumbled home in her wet clothes, seeing herself as one might see the world if they climbed high in a tree. The grounds were out of focus. No heed was paid to the misting rain falling from the ashy sky, nor the lush greenery of the yards of lawn, nor the shrubberies and their carefully curated shapes. Her only thoughts were of walls, and of somewhere to lie alone so that those walls could encase her, hold her tightly, as tightly as Dani’s warm embrace.

Time slowed. The hours blended into each other, discernible only by the angles of the light and the noise of the creatures coming to life. So much life, she thought from the confines of her bed on a foggy morning. How could they be up for it? she wondered, but remembered that animals with innocent intelligence knew nothing of grief. Of what it turned people into. Spectres of themselves, wandering, perceiving only what they wanted and yet nothing at all; bitter people so consumed with sadness and longing, they became envious of all life, including the innocent ones.

And how could life go on as it did, while she was tucked away in a pocket of misery? How could they wake and not reach to the right where their lover used to lay and not have a wave of grief wash over them anew at the emptiness their hand met?

“So, tell me,” Dani had said.

“Tell you what?”

“Another example of how plants are better than people.”

“You didn’t believe me the other night?”

She saw Dani shrug in her peripheral vision. A large movement of sweater-covered shoulders. So fucking American. “I just wanna be sure of your position.”

The gardener nodded. “All right.” She plucked a half-dead marigold from the counter. “See how this one’s dyin’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You see me cryin’ over it?”

“Not yet.”

The gardener smiled. Rolled her eyes. “I don’t cry over plants.” She cradled the pot between her hands. “Plants die and you don’t grieve. You don’t talk about them or keep their photos hangin’ on the wall. You say a frustrated “Fuck” and then re-plant it. Hope it grows again. No tears. No speeches. Simple shite.”

Dani was nodding. “I see,” it said. She continued, after a pause, “Okay, you have a point. But I see an awful lot of a person in there.”

“Where?” the gardener asked, once again bewildered by this girl and her rabbity brain.

“I-It’s not about the plant, really, but the nature of it,” Dani said. “Plants thrive in different environments, right? Sunlight, shade, indoors, outdoors, but they can’t do it by themselves. They need a nurturer, someone who can see their needs and understand them. If those are taken care of… they bloom.”

The gardener absorbed the words. “Are you sayin’ you think people are better than plants?”

Dani’s reply was soft. And her eyes, when before they were passionate and amused, were shy. “Some of them.”

A smile formed on the gardener’s lips. “I could kiss you, Poppins, if you weren’t so fuckin’ jumpy.”

She’d joked to take the seriousness from the moment, but also to prevent herself from adding to it further.

The problem with people was they didn’t grow back.

**II.**

**Other Gardens**

**I** **t was around** this time the gardener realized the things grief made one do. Reading about it in an article or a book caused the actions of a mourner to appear comical. Talking to someone that isn’t there, eating a certain dish on a particular day, purposefully leaving an umbrella in the house and walking in the cold, pouring rain. “Really?” one might say. “People do that?” And one laughs, until it happens to them. Until the longing and the sadness dance together so often, they’re left tormented and restless.

So what, then, did grief make the gardener do?

She began cracking the bedroom door. Not much, mind you, but enough to say, “I’ve left it open for you. Come in. I’m waiting.” There was a small hope in that action, as small as the crack. A small hope that, somehow, if she left the door open and turned a chair expectantly toward it, Dani would push it and enter, sopping, smelling like mud and lake plants, miraculously alive. Every night the gardener did this, no matter how hazy the day had been. It was the only other constant she had, this tiny, needlepoint hope. A beginning of a ritual. It reminded her of Hannah lighting her red-glassed candles in remembrance of the dead.

Once the doors took hold, another did too.

The gardener remembered, rather against her will, the last days leading up to the lake. There was water involved. And mirrors. And glass. Anything that cast a reflection. “I see her face.” Dani’s words shadowed her. Yet the gardener could not recall when she had begun to look at her own reflection. It was as if she’d simply begun and resumed, a little like that day in the kitchen, where she said absolutely no word to Dani Clayton in welcome, only walked in and felt nothing unnatural. That the scene at the table before her was a painting in a gallery she’d memorized long ago. The action started and continued. A glance in the mirror in the mornings or when she was washing up for lunch or dinner; another glance in a full tub or water bucket or a filling sink.

Nothing ever stared back at her but herself. But like the door, there was hope. “Maybe this time,” she said. “Maybe this time. Or tomorrow. Or the night after that.”

A mantra. Just like the others. Spoken in private, in hushed whispers in hallways so that the children, if they happened to be awake, wouldn’t hear.

“There will be other nights,” she’d said to Dani, the night after they’d made love, smiling at each other, Dani’s saying, “I wish tonight counted.” The mantra had been true, then. There were other nights. Other talks. Other intimacies.

“There will be other gardens for you,” the note had said. “A dozen others, where you’ll plant our flowers and you’ll remember every time you look at them.”

_“There will be other gardens…”_

“Not for me,” the gardener had said on the edge of the lake. “Not for me.”

She’d gaze at her reflection and wonder if the life she was living was the other garden Dani had mentioned.


End file.
